Category: Transitions

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

The seventh, and final post, is by Kelly Cole, Associate Professor and Departmental Executive Officer, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Health and Human Physiology.

Open Access Publication Just Makes Sense

According to the PLOS organization, “Open Access ..stands for unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse” of peer-reviewed original scholarly work (emphasis added). I’m tempted to stop right there. Unrestricted access and unrestricted reuse of our discoveries that mostly were supported by public funds and hence deserve to be in the public’s hands rapidly (and the NIH agrees). With digital access worldwide assured by the world-wide-web, we assure the second of the two basic tenets of modern science – dissemination (the first being discovery). What else is left to debate?

This is the simple, honest motivation for me to publish in Open Access journals – rapid, worldwide dissemination. The profit-driven and slightly unsavory alternative has been well-discussed from the very first thoughts about the possibility of open access publishing; namely print publishers (in paper or digital format) who own the rights to the published articles, then charge fees for digital access, and who then require permission for reuse at a fee (they own copyright). (We’ve all been through the copyright torture when we attempt to write a chapter in a book using figures from our published work.) Clearly, these are the expected policies of a for-profit, bottom-line enterprise, and a partnership with scholars that worked to the advantage of both parties. I accepted that early in my career. The model worked in its own perverse way, and it was the only game in town for world-wide dissemination, not to mention its role in career advancement through peer-review and the need to publish in high-impact journals for maximum gain.

The burgeoning success of Open Access publication, along with digital media and the world-wide-web, clearly shows that it is time to move on. The remaining barriers to each individual scholar for deciding whether or not to publish in Open Access seem to be rooted in decisions about career advancement; that is, the need to publish in elite, supposedly high-impact journals. Last year Prof. Bernd Fritzch wrote a wonderful entry to this blog site concerning the eroding utility of journal impact factors, and the ongoing evolution of newer ways of tracking citation impact of a scientist’s work (such as the h-index and others). It would seem that with digital access (and digital searching), amplified further by open access, the impact of a paper is now less a matter of where it was published, and more a matter of the content of the paper (as it should).

I too remember long days in the library with Index Medicus, tracking down papers, which then evolved into Current Contents mailed to your lab periodically. We didn’t have time to scour every possible key word or topic heading (remember, we were turning pages in a catalog and we couldn’t use arbitrary key words and the magic of Boolean operators). We focused first on the keywords and terms that made the most sense (and were always amazed when someone turned up an important paper that escaped our search), and then on a subset of high-impact journals. Many of these journals were high impact because of the shared, tacit agreement amongst our peers to publish our best work in just the places where we all tended to look first.

Folks, those days are over. With digital search across large, publicly supported databases, our work can be found just about anywhere, barring our poor choices of titles or keywords. That means your work will be found in Open Access journals, and it will be cited based on the merits of your scholarship and not just the reputation of the journal. This scenario continues to evolve, but the direction seems clear and we’re building speed. Prof. Fritzsch asked the question “Are we witnessing a revolution in information flow…?” I’m wondering if Bernd asked the question as a rhetorical device. It seems to me the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’!

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

The sixth guest post is by Kembrew McLeod, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa and an independent documentary producer. A prolific author and filmmaker, he has written and produced several books and documentaries that focus on popular music, independent media and copyright law.

See all of Kembrew’s Iowa Research Online deposited publications here.

Freedom of Expression was my second book, which originally was published by Doubleday-a trade press that miraculously allowed me to license it under a Creative Commons license. These licenses make it easy for authors to legally encourage the sharing of their work, and it has been an enormously successful project (since 2004, millions of books, songs, etc. have been published under Creative Commons licenses). “Genres, Subgeners, Sub-Subgenres and more” is an article I wrote when I was a grad student, which happens to be one of my most cited publications.

Q: Were there specific reasons behind putting these two publications in the IRO?

Quite simply, I wanted to make it easy to share my work, and by putting it in the hands of librarians, I knew that it would be properly archived and made accessible to the public

Q: Have you seen any benefits from having these works available freely and openly through the IRO?

Yes, definitely. By making it accessible, it increases the chances that other scholars (and, more generally, the public) might be exposed to my writing. This has certainly increased the number of other scholarly publications that have cited my work, which is obviously a good thing.

Q: What are your general thoughts on the value and importance of academics making their work open access?

Open Access is hugely important. In fact, I no longer publish in journals that have overly restrictive copyright policies. The final straw was when I was prevented from sharing one of my own articles because Digital Rights Management (DRM) crippled the PDF file. DRM is a technological protection system that limits the number of times-or the ways in which-a work may be copied and distributed. After I emailed the PDF of my article to my undergrad class, a student tried to print out a copy of my article. Unfortunately, all that was printed out was a blank sheet of paper, save for a notice at the bottom that read: “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.”

I had no idea Blackwell, the company that published it, set limits on the distribution of my own article, though I’m not at all surprised. I can’t think of a more disturbing, yet poetic, expression of copyright-gone-mad than a blank sheet of paper where published research should be. The most insane thing is that I got the PDF from a database that the University of Iowa subscribes to-which means that the state paid me a salary to produce knowledge, and then my library had to pay a private company to access that knowledge, and on top of all that I was still prevented from distributing my own writing!

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

The fifth guest post is by Matthew Uhlman, Urology Resident, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

Expectations Exceeded – My Experience With The Open Access Fund

Thanks for the chance to write about our experience with the open access (OA) fund here at Iowa. To introduce myself, my name is Matt Uhlman and I’m a 6th year Urology resident at the University. Over my time here, I’ve seen and learned a lot. Being at a large referral center, and in Urology no less, we see plenty of abnormal things and when we come across them, we often look to the mystical “literature” for guidance.

In a number of instances, I found that there wasn’t much written on the things I was seeing and since I find that writing about cases helps me process through them and cement concepts, there were a number of times I, along with colleagues, decided we wanted to write up a case we’d seen. There are very limited options for such papers (case reports), but what I found was OA journals had emerged as a place for them. For a long time, I’d written off such journals figuring they were just filled with the ramblings of people paying to publish stuff that wasn’t really worth my time. However, as I started to look around for case reports, I found they were a really helpful resource as they were effectively mini-review articles on rare things.

During my research year, I had written up a number of cases and when I came across the OA fund at the University, using it was a no brainer. The costs to publish weren’t prohibitive, but were unfortunately a tough sell to the department given the tight budgets we work within. After I learned about the fund, I talked with the librarians who work with it and was happy to learn how eager they were to help me get support. It didn’t feel like I was going to a tight fisted group who would find any reason to not support our efforts, but rather an ally who genuinely wanted to get behind us.

Since that time and with the knowledge of the OA fund, I’ve been able to utilize it another 4 or 5 times, publishing in a number of different journals. An interesting unintended, but positive, outcome from the OA fund has been the opportunity to help a number of medical students publish. Without dedicated research time, it can be tough to find time for long term research projects. Being able to help students write up a case report or short review article has been a great way to get them involved in researching a subject and then contributing to the overall body of medical literature, plus, it looks nice on their resume when they apply for residency!

Looking back over the last few years since I found out about, and started using the OA fund, it’s been a catalyst to being able to publish on the things I’m encountering on a daily basis in residency, not just the things that others deem “worthy”. Case and point, we recently published a paper on the safety of instillation of a chemotherapy compound in the bladder at the time of a specific surgery. We had submitted the paper to a number of journals and had basically been told, “This isn’t a common cancer, nor a common practice. Come back when you have a randomized trial”. For anyone familiar with research, randomized trials take a long time, a lot of coordination, a lot of money and early safety/efficacy data. We decided to go with a more well-known OA journal within Urology and ultimately had the paper accepted and published. After doing so, we started hearing from physicians at different institutions who were interested in starting a trial, now that someone had done the initial safety work. There’s a long way to go, but the first step was publishing our results and the OA fund made that much more attainable.

My experience with the fund at Iowa has been uniformly positive. To anyone thinking about utilizing the funds, I say go for it. It’s allowed me to write about the things I’m seeing, walk with students through the process of publishing and publish on topics that are timely, but don’t always fit into the limited scope of our standard journals. I don’t know if this sort of fund is available elsewhere, but I feel like it should be!

Again, thanks for the opportunity to write about my experience. I hope y’all have a great day!

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience with Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

The fourth guest post is by Ed Folsom, the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at The University of Iowa. He is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-director of the Whitman Archive, and editor of the Whitman Series at The University of Iowa Press. He is the author or editor of numerous books and essays on Whitman and other American writers.

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review Goes Open Access

Walt Whitman has always been a kind of open-access author. While he did guard the copyright to his books (primarily because as a bookmaker he was always concerned about having a say in how his physical books looked), he was most concerned with getting his poetry and prose widely and inexpensively distributed. He continually made his work available to publishers overseas, to translators, and to newspapers, magazines, and anthologists. He saw himself as the first democratic poet, trying to create a truly democratic voice, one that broke down hierarchy and discrimination and privilege. For a democratic literature to function effectively, all citizens needed access. When Whitman died, he put his work in the hands of three literary executors in order to make it widely available; he never set up a protective estate that would police access to his published books and unpublished manuscripts and notebooks. The executors quickly published the materials they had, and Whitman’s work traveled into the public domain expeditiously. Anyone today can quote or reprint or put online his poetry and prose without any worries about rights or permissions.

Whitman scholarship has long been marked by this same democratic spirit. Whitman scholars are legendary for their generosity in sharing their work and supporting young scholars who are challenging and questioning the assumptions of previous generations. When Kenneth M. Price and I decided back in the mid-1990s to create the online Walt Whitman Archive, we were determined to make the site open and freely available to students, scholars, and general readers around the world. Thanks to the generosity of the University of Iowa, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, along with other agencies and private contributors, we have been able to keep the growing archive of Whitman’s work and work about Whitman freely accessible to users of the Web.

With the generous support of the UI Library’s Digital Research & Publishing unit, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review—the international journal of record for Whitman studies, published at the University of Iowa since 1983—went online in 2010. As part of the Iowa Research Online initiative, all back issues of the journal were digitized and made freely available through the new WWQR website. As was the case with many academic journals going online in the early 2000s, WWQR embargoed the most recent year’s issues and made them accessible only to subscribers; meanwhile, we continued producing and distributing print issues. During the five years we have been online, we have learned a great deal about our readership that we never knew when we were solely a print journal—how many readers access our articles, for example. It became clear that most readers—even our print subscribers—were now reading the journal online, and the expensive print issues were largely going unread (like my Sunday print copy of The New York Times, which I have delivered to my house only so that I can have access to the Times online site, where I have read most of what’s in the Sunday paper long before the unread print copy arrives).

We have, since 2010, been making WWQR articles available on the Walt Whitman Archive, where they are linked to the Archive’s bibliography of Whitman scholarship. Readers, then, can access WWQR journal articles either on the Archive site or on the WWQR site maintained by Iowa Research Online. This past year, I began discussions with members of the WWQR Advisory Board, with digital librarians at Iowa, and with my RAs, about moving the journal entirely online as a fully open-access publication. There was surprisingly little resistance and in fact some very real enthusiasm, and the decision solved what were becoming increasingly problematic financial concerns. The costs of printing and distributing the print copies, as well as the costs of paying for a subscription fulfillment service, were steadily increasing, even while our subscriber base was holding steady. To make the transition, we have added compositing work to the tasks the WWQR RA now handles, and our first issue—the first number of volume 33 of the journal—appears this week, appropriately, as a contribution to Open Access Week. In collaboration with the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, we have added color and undertaken some modest re-design in order to create a new look that works effectively online while also maintaining the feel of the thirty-three-year-old journal. I’m proud of what we have been able to accomplish in a short period of time, and I look forward to working with the Studio to make the full transition to a new-old journal, available worldwide to anyone interested in Whitman—a journal that is now taking a giant step toward realizing Whitman’s dream of free and equal access to the ongoing understanding of the ever-evolving democratic writing that Whitman initiated, nurtured, and continues to sustain.

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

The third guest post is by Meenakshi Gigi Durham, distinguished scholar, teacher, and writer whose work centers on media and the politics of the body. Her research emphasizes issues of gender, sexuality, race, youth cultures, and sexual violence. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.

A vital aspect of doing academic work is disseminating the knowledge we create so as to maximize its potential to have positive effects on the world. That’s why I’m a fan of institutional repositories. The impetus in the United States today seems to be to corporatize and commoditize education, somehow turning it into a for-profit enterprise instead of a public good. Institutional repositories are a great way to challenge and resist that impulse, returning us to the recognition that research is a crucial element of a collective vision of social progress.

I lived for years in a resource-poor country, and I know that even in the wealthier nations, there are many institutions and scholars who don’t have access to the treasure trove of databases we are privileged to use every day via the wonderful library system at the University of Iowa. But scholarship can’t happen without access to up-to-date knowledge; as scholars, we build on the work that advances our fields. It’s always been inspiring to me that some of the world’s greatest ideas and inventions have been catalyzed by an encounter with some prior work: Galileo read Copernicus and came up with his theory of heliocentrism; Srinivasa Ramanujam read G.S. Carr and made groundbreaking contributions to number theory; Toni Morrison read Virginia Woolf and went on to write Nobel Prize-winning novels. Connecting with the thoughts and ideas and perspectives of others inspires and informs us. We need to make sure the next great scholar can read everything he or she wants to. Part of our work is facilitating the discoveries of the future. That takes generosity and a social conscience —that’s the spirit behind teaching, just as it is behind scholarship.

So whenever I can, I contribute my writings to Iowa Research Online. I offer my work humbly, as part of a community of thinkers whose aims are to change the world for the better. It’s truly gratifying that my IRO papers have been downloaded far more often than they have from commercial journal websites or databases. I hope they are contributing to the way others are thinking about the issues I study: gender, sexuality, and the media. I hope they are sparking new ways to think about these issues, and I hope those ideas will translate into the real goals of my own work, which include social justice, gender equity, and an end to sexual violence.

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

There is little doubt that the open access (OA) model for publishing scientific literature has revolutionized the academic approach to publishing and the publication industry itself. Since the advent of OA publishing there has been an exponential proliferation of OA journals which currently number greater than 10,000 (https://doaj.org). I personally receive countless requests to serve on the editorial boards of these journals which I typically ignore and promptly delete. Academic institutions have embraced the OA model since traditional journals can cost as much as $20,000 per year for an institutional subscription. Indeed, universities such as the University of Iowa offer incentives in the form of payment of publication fees for their faculty to publish in OA journals. Indeed my trainees and I have benefitted from these incentives and have published several papers in OA journals within the last several years. One of these (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24672806), published two years ago in the reputable Dove Press journal Hypoxia is currently the most viewed and downloaded paper since the journal’s inception. Clearly this has provided a brilliant showcase for our work and we have benefitted from the university’s OA policy. Open access allows free and ready access to its readers, while passing the costs of production and publication off to the contributors of literary content. And while this “pay to publish” approach opens opportunities for investigators to quickly and broadly disseminate their findings, OA publishing also has a dark side. This dark side is manifest in the proliferation of “predatory” journals that accept work that may be of questionable quality and significance. Such journals should be actively avoided and are identified on Beall’s list of predatory journals which can be found at http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/. One of the perils of the pay to publish model are the presentation of opportunities for blatant conflicts of interest in the publication process http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1307577). For example, pharma businesses might take advantage of the lower rejection rates and relaxed journal standards in OA journals to publish prematurely or incompletely to promote the interests of their company. Another troubling aspect of the proliferating OA model is the pressure to provide qualified competent reviewers from a limited pool of knowledgeable experts, the demands on whose time are typically already overextended, to review the avalanche of submitted manuscripts. Since the material in OA journals is disseminated digitally there are essentially no page limits and so the numbers of papers and rate of papers published is astronomical. Already more than 2 million papers are published in the greater than 10,000 OA journals mentioned above. Almost certainly the rigor of review that is afforded these papers is on average substantially below that of traditional journals. These acknowledgements appear to have led to an improved perception of the value of publications in traditional journals for the communication of highly reliable and reproducible results. Other digital resources such as ArXiv (http://arxiv.org/) enable investigators to disseminate their own findings before they are peer-reviewed in pre-print form known as e-prints, so the information can be distributed to interested parties without delays or compromising the quality of the finally published work. And while ArXiv may have downsides of its own (http://mathoverflow.net/questions/65090/downsides-of-using-the-arxiv) it may present a viable alternative to OA publishing, and at minimal or no expense. Hopefully this discussion highlighting the two-faced nature of OA publishing will leave the reader with a better sense of risks and benefits of both publishing in and reading from OA journals.

During the month of Open Access week (October 19-25) we will be highlighting a number of guest posts from University of Iowa Faculty and Staff who have personal experience making their work Open Access. We appreciate their contributions.

The first guest post is by Associate Professor, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Ph.D. University of Iowa, Departmental Executive Officer of the Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, Faculty member of the School of Art and Art History/Media, Social Practice, and Design

Open Access is the way that new knowledge is made…easier

October 19-25 is International Open Access Week all across the world. As a scholar I have directly benefited from participating in the Iowa Research Online open access platform. One of my articles has been downloaded over 12,000 times. The ripple effects of this can be seen easily on Google Scholar. That particular article is cited numerous times by other people who are pursuing similar questions in countries like Albania and Spain. If not for open access and my participation in the Iowa Research Online program I doubt those scholars would have found my work.

As a public servant at a public university I feel that an open access system for all of the scholarship that we produce is important. Print journals are expensive to produce, subscriptions are costly for individuals and libraries, and people without access to the journal can’t use the information. Ultimately as researchers we want to engage in conversations with other people about our work and trends or ideas in our field. My own research often appeals to people who are not directly connected with a university. It gives me great pleasure to know that they can still find and read my scholarship even if they can’t afford a subscription to a journal, they live in a place where the journal is not available, or they are not aware of what journals to consult in order to find information about a particular topic.

We are always standing on the shoulders of giants. Climbing up to those places in order to survey the world stretched out before us should be easy, free, and independent of our connections in academia. It is important to find what came before us with regard to a history of ideas. I wrote my dissertation at a time when printed journals were still the way that scholarship was disseminated. Google was still five years away from launching Google Scholar. As a doctoral student I traveled to university libraries all over the country to browse stacks, read journals, and find information. It was a slow, expensive, and arduous process. Now, I can simply use the internet to find information from the comfort of my own couch. With open access I can still read that information even if my university does not subscribe to the journal or I don’t have funding to purchase the articles. Having easy and free access to the ideas of others can spark our creativity, help us formulate new ideas and approaches, keep us from being redundant, and make collaboration easier, thus creating new knowledge.

Open access also levels the playing field. As an educator I care deeply about equality. Students from schools with small budgets or in developing countries can access the work of others without barriers As a teacher, it broadens the possibilities of ideas and research that I can share with students. Nothing is more frustrating than finding an abstract that seems relevant to your lecture only to discover you can’t access it without paying for it. This has real relevance for my colleagues in medicine where people’s lives might depend on access to the latest research about procedures or pharmaceuticals.

If we are committed to making new knowledge and advancing the act of discovery we must all commit ourselves to open access and to the possibilities it offers to everyone who has the technological ability to surf the web.

As emeritus faculty, I’ve spent my career researching and writing about politics. I published my first academic paper in 1974. Then as it is today, having your academic work cited is critical. But now the methods of scholarly publishing are very different. Academic publishers and academic libraries alike are faced with financial challenges of changing technologies and greater demand for information.

Over the course of my career I’ve authored or co-authored more than 200 articles and books in comparative elections, election forecasting, political economy and quantitative methodology. I can’t hazard a guess as to how many students, researchers and others have read my ideas in the past 40 years.

Then three years ago, 24 of my articles and book chapters were uploaded into Iowa Research Online (http://ir.uiowa.edu). Now each month, I receive notification of how many times an article has been downloaded. It’s exciting to see those numbers grow. But what might be even more exhilarating is the fact that my work will be available to students and researchers in perpetuity.

When I was about 12 years old, I awoke to find a thick blanket of snow had covered our neighborhood. Initially I wanted to shovel a few walks for our elderly neighbors so they would have a path clear of ice and snow. Then I started thinking what I would charge my customers, imagining how much money I could make. As I calculated, I saw more and more dollar signs. Before long, the sun had gone down and it was too late to go out. No walks were shoveled and no money was made because I was too excited about the cash.

Thinking about open access publishing and copyright laws reminds me of that day in winter. Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to pick up that shovel to clear the path for others, but have been stymied by copyright. Recently a doctor from Poland requested a case report I’d published, but before I could send him the article I started worrying about who owned the copyright – me or the publisher. In the end I wasn’t at liberty to share the knowledge I’d gained to help another doctor improve the care he gives his patients.

And then there was the article I wrote that I wanted to share with all our residents. I couldn’t figure out how to without risking copyright infringement. I finally thumbtacked one of my complimentary copies to the residents’ bulletin board, which I think still has a clipping from the Eisenhower administration.

Finally, a colleague asked me if I would post his fine editorial that had been rejected by a journal on my open-access blog. I was more than happy to oblige, and I think the authors did me and my readers a remarkable service. I’m really shoveling now.

So to me, open access is all about sharing what I learn with other clinicians. The goal is improving patient care, in my book. That’s what my blog is all about. What you find there is free and open access. You can help.

Open access publishing’s place in the humanities is uncertain at the moment, and knowledge of it will be important going forward in resolving inequitable relationships between presses and authors, journal vendors and libraries, and publishers and readers. The University of Iowa Libraries has invited Don Share, senior editor of Poetry magazine, to talk about open access publishing platforms and contemporary humanities literature and scholarship.

Monday, October 29th at 3pm Illinois Room of the Iowa Memorial Union (Share will also be giving a poetry reading at Prairie Lights in the evening, at 7 pm.)

In 2002, Ruth Lilly, heiress to the Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, left Poetry magazine 100 million dollars upon her death, and among the things Poetry has done with the Lilly bequest is go open access. Each month the magazine publishes a print issue, as it has been doing for 100 years, and since 2003 it has simultaneously made each issue’s contents freely available on its website (see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/). Don Share was one of the principle architects of this initiative, and he is in a unique position to discuss how literature and humanities scholarship function on an open access platform.

Don Share is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine. His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), and most recently a new book of poems, Wishbone (Black Sparrow), and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions); he has also edited a critical edition of Bunting’s work for Faber and Faber. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books) were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclán, and will appear in a revised edition from NYRB Classics. He has been Poetry Editor of Harvard Review and Partisan Review, Editor of Literary Imagination, and curator of poetry at Harvard University. With Christian Wiman, he co-hosts the monthly Poetry magazine podcast and has co-editedThe Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press). For his work at Poetry he has earned two National Magazine Awards for Editorial Excellence.

Praise for Don Share’s poems:

“Don Share’s work is compressed as a haiku, intent as a tanka, witty as a sonnet, witless as a song, relentless as an expose, patter without pretension . . . his elegant poetry, exposed as a haiku, expansive as a renga, boisterous as a bridge, happy as Delmore Schwartz with Lou Reed and vice versa, vivacious as the living day . . . built out of attention, music and sight.” -David Shapiro “Share is one of the more gifted craftsmen we have writing in America today.” -Erin Belieu, Boston Review

“Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music.” -Alice Fulton Praise for The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press)

“If readers would like to sample the genius and diversity of American poetry in the last century, there’s no better place to start than The Open Door.” (World Literature Today)

“A high-wire anthology of electric resonance. . . . The editors then arranged these redefining poems by poets of the pantheon and poets overlooked, underrated, or new in pairings and sequences of thrilling contrapuntal dynamics. Wiman’s opening essay is titled ‘Mastery and Mystery,’ and those are, indeed, the forces at work here, inducing readers to marvel anew at the strange impulse to write poetry and the profound effort required to do it well.” (Booklist)

“With this collection, Share and Wiman want only to promote the art of poetry, something they do exceedingly well. Highly recommended.” (Library Journal, starred review )

“A wonderful anthology. . . . In many ways this is a wonderfully democratic anthology–to get in, you don’t have to be famous, you just need to be good.” (National Post, Canada)